The lens of the game shifted again, this time settling on Laras Widyasari. The air in her chamber felt heavier than most—perhaps because of the man sitting across from her.
Her opponent was a retired gang member with hollow eyes and a body slouched from years of street living. The cards in Laras's hands told his story in brutal detail: a man who had once commanded fear, now reduced to scavenging scraps of life. He'd lost his family one by one—wife, son, daughter—all cut down as retaliation for his own bloody past. The years since had been an aimless curse, spent in back alleys, stealing what he needed to survive, always waiting for the day his debts would finally catch up to him.
Laras set her cards down slowly, leaning closer to the square opening in the wall. Her voice trembled—not with fear, but with desperation.
"Please… leave me. I need to take care of my daughter."
The man's eyes flicked up from her file, scanning her face for signs of a lie. He read over her own tragic record—widowed young, barely scraping by, her life condensed into a few cold sentences.
A small smirk tugged at his lips.
"Well… you do have a reason to survive," he admitted. Then his voice hardened. "But why would I agree to it?"
The weight of the question sat between them like an executioner's shadow.
The view shifted again, dissolving into the chamber of Kinanti Jayasari—or perhaps Kinanti Widyasari. In this game, names could be masks, and masks could hide truths nobody wanted uncovered.
Her opponent was a man in his mid-forties with the sallow skin of someone who had lived too long inside a bottle. His file was almost pitiful—once a petty thief, now an alcoholic who stole just enough to buy another drink. But here, inside the sterile room, there was no alcohol. He'd been without it for days.
His eyes were glassy, his head nodding forward in sluggish movements. He barely looked at the cards in his hand. Instead, he just stared at Kinanti as though she were nothing more than part of the wall.
Kinanti, however, was wide awake inside her own mind. Her fingers gripped the edges of her chair, knuckles pale.
I have to escape… I have to escape… I have to escape for my mother.
The mantra repeated in her head like the beating of a war drum. Every second spent in this room was another second stolen from the future she needed to protect.
In the control room above, someone watching her chamber leaned forward, noting the unwavering focus in her eyes.
And somewhere, unseen, the game kept ticking forward.